This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view.
While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment.
No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course.
This course is taught in English.
View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb

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Indian politics 1948-2014

This week we will cover the post-independence politics of India from 1948 to 2014. It will discuss the various leaders especially the contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi to Indian polity. You will get an idea about how India went about its task of nation building and the various challenges it confronted along the way. The section will also cover the dominance of the Congress party and the factors that led to its downfall in recent times. The debates about linguistic states, affirmative action, secularism and the changing nature of Indian federalism will be discussed. You should be able to appreciate the reasons as to why, even with all its shortcomings, India remains an exemplar of robust democracy unlike most other post-colonial countries.

Enseigné par

Anthony D'Costa

Transcription

Hi, I'm Professor Peter Mayer. I lecture in politics at the University of Adelaide. And in this lecture, we cover a huge sweep of history, about 60 years or more of Indian history and Indian politics. That means we have to leap over many complex issues in a very simplifying way, but that's the nature of what we're doing today. So, in this lecture, we'll be looking at the following things. We'll be looking at, first of all, an introduction. I will then be looking at a number of aspects of what I call India from above. The formal politics, the politics of the Congress Party, the politics of Prime Ministers. Looking essentially, chronologically from 1947 to 2014. Then, in the second section, we'll look at what I think of as India from below, the kind of nuts and bolts of social change, and that'll be in two parts. We'll first look at changes which took place in the southern Indian state of Tamilnadu and then we'll look at what took place in the politics of India's huge, its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. And then finally, we'll do some conclusions and look at two big questions. The first of which is why India has remained a democracy when so many other developing countries are turned into autocracies. And then, we'll look at the question, almost the one we start with, which is why over the years did the Congress Party, which was once totally dominant in Indian politics, why did it lose that dominant position? By way of starting, by way of introduction, however, I want to have us look at two brief snippets of video. This first is a very famous moment in India, when it's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is making a very famous speech, his so-called Tryst with Destiny speech. It's a bit grainy but a beautiful wonderful setting of the beginning of India's formal political life. The second is the other end of the book, the other bookend if you wish, of new Prime Minister Narendra Modi being sworn in in May 2014. A very grand swearing in ceremony outside the Parliament in New Delhi. So we'll look at those and then we'll come back and take up the story form there. Let's begin with a bit of an overview in his famous Tryst with Destiny speech. There's a phrase that Nehru uses, that I've partially quoted here. He says, long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. My feeling is that that redeeming of the pledge is still not entirely done. So here's some examples of the progress India has made and the distance still to go since 1947. Here's a chart showing life expectancy. In 1951 men and women could live, expect to live a bit over 30. Men 33, women 32. We're now up into nearly 70 and just almost 70 for men. So, huge progress given where we started. Here's literacy. In 1947, something like 16% of men and less than 5% of women could read and write. We're now approaching near universal literacy for men, still a ways to go, and women, now over 60%. So, not yet achieved, but huge progress made. Most Indians in 1947 lived in abject poverty. What we can see here is that roughly speaking, up until 1981, there really wasn't much change in the levels of poverty. Some actually went up during difficulties in the 1970s. It's really only since the period of reforms that we actually see big declines in poverty. There are arguments on how we measure poverty, but the trend, I think, is pretty clear and pretty well accepted by everyone. Let's finally look at India's population. India's population was under 400 million at independence. It's now 1.2 billion and is expected to peak around 1.6 billion before it starts to go down around the middle of the 21st century. So a huge population, it will be when it passes China, maybe in 2016 or 2020, the most populous nation in the world. Now I want to do a quick overview of some of the characters we're going to look at. And look at a theme, which is that of a declining domination of the Congress Party. So here along the top, we have some of the Prime Ministers we'll be touching on, making reference to. We have Jawaharlal Nehru. We have Indira Gandhi. We have her son, Rajiv Gandhi. We have Narasimha Rao. We have Atal Bihari Vajpai, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi. So that's the timeline going from 1952 up to 2014, the first election was that held from 1952. But the blue line, which kind of traces this downward curve, is the percentage of seats in the National Parliament, the lower house, the Lok Sabha in New Delhi, held by the Congress. And we can see up until roughly speaking, 1984, the Congress had over 60% of the representation. But since 1984, it's been down, down, down and in 2014, it fell to its lowest ever level. So, part of this story that we need to consider is why has the Congress lost the dominating position which had, for the first four decades after independence and why has it declined so strongly? So if we look here on the top, this pale blue is where the Congress is been in power, green is where we've had non-Congress opposition parties and orange suitably is when the BJP has been in power. So we'll also be looking at this line here, as a period of major change and representing a real period, a break in the previous pattern of politics and a new era in political life opening up. So, the two questions that we're going to be looking at in this then are those I touched on in that introductory phrase. How can we explain the loss of domination by the Congress Party and the corresponding fragmentation of the political system? And the broader, bigger question - why has India remained a democracy when so many former colonies succumbed to autocracy? To answer those questions we'll do, first of all, a look at the formal politics, what was happening at the national level and the level of Prime Ministers, politics from above. And then, we'll look at societal change from below and those two specific case studies I mentioned, the southern state of Tamilnadu and the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Here's a map just reminding us where they are. Tamilnadu is down here in the south. Uttar Pradesh is just to the east of New Delhi up here. But I'm also going to choose a few examples which emerge out of my own recent research on the sociology of suicide. Slightly dark topic. That's a reference to a recently published book of mine. But they help say something about the intensity with which Indian politics is conducted, and frame a couple of key moments in Indian political life, which I want to unpack as a result of using them as introduction. So, we'll begin then in this next section by looking at the long-term change of India from above, the first couple of years, especially the years when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister.